psychology

I Meant To Be Something Else

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IMG_4316Has this ever happened to you? You’re eating lunch and flipping absent-mindedly through Oprah magazine when a picture of chocolate catches your eye. But not just any chocolate: this is artisan chocolate, made “using the same processing techniques Mayans and Aztecs relied on thousands of years ago.” It seems that Los Angeles chocolatier Patricia Tsai was inspired to produce it after tasting traditionally made chocolate while on a tour of the Yucatan.

A little spark of anxiety ignites at the base of your spine. You put down your sandwich and look up from your magazine. Because you’ve just realized something incredibly important: what you do isn’t what you were meant to do. And unless you want to live a life of constant regret, you must chuck it immediately and pursue the [profoundly fulfilling] thing that is your true calling. Stephen Cope, in his book, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, calls this living along the spine of your dharma.

But there’s something else, too. It isn’t just that you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s that you’re doing the too big thing. The thing you now know you should be doing is (you believe, because you have no real understanding of it) deliciously, delightfully “small”. What could possibly be involved in being a chocolatier (even one who takes a cue from primitive societies) besides throwing together some cocoa and milk, stirring it up, and then hanging out in your shop all day in the hippest part of a hip town, selling to hipsters? Although to clarify, it’s not the alleged “easy” part that lures you. It’s that you know the profoundest satisfaction sprouts from the belly of single-minded purpose.

And it is, of course, an illusion, a fantasy, a hold-over from the days of childhood when all that was required to be a superhero was to dress like one and all it took to be a mommy was to carry a plastic baby around by its hair. There’s a reason stories about simplifying our life, and movies about romantic love, get to us, and it’s precisely because there’s no “there” there. We don’t hear (or we don’t listen to) the parts about the ego pain or financial struggle or long hours involved in retrofitting a career. And lovers in movies never go the bathroom, run out of dinner conversation, or pluck chin hairs.

Which is not to say you should go back to your Oprah magazine and your sandwich and blot out the voices in your head telling you to make a change. One of the funniest things my father ever said was something he didn’t intend to be funny: “Everything means something to you, doesn’t it, Dr. R.?” As Dr. R. was a shrink, this kind of went without saying.

It’s the same with the chatter in your head. Listen, but maybe don’t take it literally. I’m thinking the chatter is more like dream imagery: messages couched in symbolism, waiting to be unravelled. I’m actually pretty happy doing what I do, and certain I don’t want to chuck it all to source chocolate. But the idea that there’s some other part of my life “seeking the spine”? Now that’s something worth considering.

The Worst Advice I Ever Got

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IMG_3847Twenty six years ago when I was 26, my father died unexpectedly. It happened to coincide with a time in my life when I was already depressed, unhappy at work, and feeling anxious about my future. Sitting on the rose-patterned corduroy sofa inside my new therapist’s office, I confessed that I felt lost, stuck, uncertain about what was to come. I wanted to leave the job, but had only been there two years. I didn’t want to leave the boyfriend, but I wasn’t ready to settle down either. I missed my family, and wondered if I should live closer to them.

“Well,” said the therapist, “You could just upset the apple cart completely.”

As I recall I stared at her in disbelief. Did people really do that? Decide that so little in their life was working that the only recourse was to chuck it all and start over?  It was the emotional equivalent of yanking the plug on some misbehaving, little-understood piece of technology and then plugging it back in with great expectations.

It was a terrible idea. But as a depressed, anxious, recently de-fathered 26 year-old, I couldn’t see this.  At that time, I believed PhDs didn’t have terrible ideas, or if they did, they used them for making hideous sofa choices. And so, three months after my father’s death, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, my best friend, my job, and the horse farm I lived on and adored, and moved to what was then the middle of nowhere.

Do I have to tell you the plan stunk? That I missed the boyfriend, the best friend, my coworkers, and the horses intensely? That what I had done, far from hitting the reset button on my life, was to heap sorrow, loneliness, and unemployment on top of grief, anxiety and confusion? I have to wonder: what did the therapist think might come of this apple-cart overthrow? Had she thought it through at all? If so, what did she think was possible?

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite questions to ask or be asked: What’s possible?  It’s a great question to ask yourself (or someone else) in times of  stuckness or uncertainty. I often wonder what would have come of my young self and my supposedly dispensable “apples” had the therapist taken the time to ask me, What’s possible if you upset the apple cart? What’s possible if you don’t? She could have even followed it with the deliciously abstract, often maddening, but almost always revealing, What else?  I might have still tossed the apples, but maybe I’d have at least salvaged the cart.

The Raspberry Imperative

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IMG_3928The other day I was flipping through Oprah magazine while eating lunch. One particular article caught my eye. It had a clever title and spoke volumes, I thought, with only three words: The Raspberry Imperative. Beneath the title was a model dressed in a raspberry-colored dress. Without even reading the article I understood that raspberry is the new spring color and that it is imperative, if I want to be “on-trend” and societally appropriate,  that I fill my closet with it. Which wouldn’t be hard: I knew TJ Maxx and Marshall’s would be a sea of raspberry the next time I went in.

The problem is that  I actually only like the color raspberry on, well, raspberries. So what to do? As I saw it, I had three choices: I could embrace the trend and deck myself in raspberry threads, thereby ignoring my own sensibilities and preferences in favor of pleasing the trend-makers. This I was good at: hadn’t I heeded society’s mandate in the 1980’s that women starve themselves to the brink of death for the visual enjoyment of others? Did I really want to go down that road again?

I could refuse raspberry clothing as I’d refused  lime clothing in years past, only to come to love it once it was no longer in style (ditto capri pants, harem pants, belly shirts and shoulder pads). This had a hint of the rebel in it, for all the ways I showed up rocking said trend after its demise (though in truth I wasn’t so much rocking it as I simply didn’t have competition anymore, as everyone had moved on to skinny jeans and peasant tops).

Or  I could embrace some tiny facet of the raspberry wave–a hint of a camisole peeking out from a neckline perhaps? A raspberry-fringed scarf? This seemed the most open-minded, the least argumentative, and so I  put on my reading glasses to see if the article had some suggestions for how I might  work this compromise.  Which is when I saw that the title was not The Raspberry Imperative, but Transparent Motive. There wasn’t even a “The”; this I had added completely on my own.

It turns out that raspberry is not the color trend of the season, or maybe it is, but that’s not what this article was about. It was about how to wear dresses with see-through panels in a sophisticated, grown-up way, sans drama and the wrong things revealed. It was nothing I cared anything about.

I had to laugh. My brain had taken what it thought it saw and charged down a path of its own devising, plucking liberally from its own reserves of  obsession, fear, disappointment, reticence, and finally, concession. I had to hand it to it: it came eventually to a place of open-mindedness, of middle-ground over extremes. But there was still an edgy discomfort about the whole episode. As if I had not quite been the master (as Seinfeld might say, albeit about something entirely different)  of my domain.

Thinking Inside the Box

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IMG_3703I have a fantasy about a house. It’s a tiny house my husband and I pass every afternoon on our walk. It sits over a one-car garage, and couldn’t possibly contain anything larger than a twin bed, a dormroom-sized refrigerator, and a minuscule bathroom. On the front porch–which is just large enough for a chair and a hanging plant–there sits a tiny long-haired terrier who surveys us quietly as we go by. The house is barely bigger than a self.

My husband and I live a half mile away in a house that is nearly 3000 square feet. We have an acre yard that until two months ago was the province of my two very elderly cocker spaniels, Shark and Bella. On our generous deck is a table the size of a small boat, which we bought because we have 10 friends we see every month, and we wanted to be able to seat everyone comfortably. It’s a lovely house and we got it for a steal when the market was soft. My favorite room is an upstairs garret where I do my writing and life coaching.

And yet my heart aches every time we pass the little house with the little chair and the little dog. I tell my husband I just want to see inside. That I’m  curious about how it’s laid out, whether the stove is a 2-burner or 4, how the living room chairs are configured, if theres a tub or a stand-up shower (my bet’s on the shower). I  wonder if there’s a sofa.

The truth is I don’t want to just see inside the house, I want to move in. But not MOVE IN move in. No, what I want is something infinitely more abstract (and somehow literal at the same time). Here I think of Annie Dillard’s passage about waking into adulthood: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” What I want is to live a life that fits me skin to skin: no wrinkles, no sagging parts, no excess. “Manageability” is the word I come up with for my husband, which is pretty good I think. There’s a great life coaching question, which is, “What if you were to think large?” So here’s a question: “What is the size of  your life, and what’s the size you want it to be?” Sometimes the urge to downsize might be a wish not to think small, but to trim excess, so that what needs to blossom can reach the light.